Placement of resource-consuming clients, such as virtual machines (VMs), on the right hosts in a distributed computer system is an important factor in efficiently utilizing physical resources in the distributed computer system. An effective client placement strategy must meet the requirements of the clients and optimize several, sometimes conflicting, goals, while taking into consideration the complexities of the distributed computer system. Thus, the selection of appropriate hosts to place the clients is an important resource management process.
Even after the clients have been properly placed on the appropriate hosts in the distributed computer system, some of these clients may have to be moved or migrated to different hosts for various reasons. Again, the selection of appropriate hosts to which the clients will be migrated is an important resource management process.
When making client placement decisions, including client migration decisions, various parameters are considered in making the decisions. Some of the parameters considered relate to resources of hosts. As an example, raw capacity of each processor core of hosts may be used to make client placement decisions with respect to compute resources. However, the parameters currently considered in making client placement decisions may not produce the desired results.